First off this is just a short note which I want to think through further. I am a little afraid to publish it but also it has been creeping around in my mind for a while and I want to at least unblock the dialogue.
A lot of poetry has become really subjectively localised and fairly narcissistic, as in resolved to not go on beyond itself / the self that composes it - the poet as a kind of deflated subordinate against the world. I think one reason for this is a very understandable suspicion of speaking on behalf of others or even posturing. However, I see this strand of writing really closing itself and its contemporaries down and I feel it comes from on the one hand a very fearful place. Fear from the rise of hate crimes. The pressure of austerities. Colossal uncertainty. I feel it also rises out of a latent and harmful pressure to testify. What use are you if you are not testifying to your own subjective pain? That kind of very harmful pressure that is so horribly present in the assumptions of roles for marginalised artists. "Can you tell us all about your journey?" etc. The personal as political but with the "personal" horribly fetishised. A kind of axiomatic totality of selfless. I also see it as a reaction against certain strands of poetry that have been historically difficult and inaccessible. However, I think this opens up a new zone of exclusion - another aesthetic blocking point. A friend recently described a lot of the poetry at a reading as similar to snippets of social media posts interspersed with responses to certain books of theory. The most suspicious part of me wants to name this as a turn away from the kinds of ambitious scope of poetics in terms of speaking about really really terrifying and impossible things for the reasons detailed above, but something that can easily be steered or steer itself into mere personal ambition; a place where a different kind of posturing can grow. What happens when poets decide only to speak for or with themselves.
Thursday, 2 May 2019
Monday, 1 April 2019
Four Sonnets (after Theresa)
And how I made a bed for you, and how
before I’m sick that outburst shudders on
in bed late payments leave their stains. I vow
in necks and sick to chuck the eldest son.
So now alive, lay you my gentle dog
head down upon your gorgeous tired stomach.
I am so out of love, but your back taut
in knots through early hours, of a feeling
sick with guilt in debt it thinks of you
without a lucid blot of false relief;
the damp of air. To sing: Why do I hear
the thundering panels sick yourself again.
So dream of finding lives to swallow up
and lever up your own heart into dust.
Oh you like none have never truly planned
for anyone sent out an even chance
of not returning but to your command
the cadence waves of what they will have left.
Drifting up to gaping air for breath
the ingrain left upon the bench is death.
Heaving for the sky they were your take;
bodies stutter ‘it was no mistake’.
Cram your shoes back on and draw a lake;
the shore is close and we will be alive.
So you watch them sink but first you take
a sodden breath and push yourself far on.
Inside the weather you well understand
it is time to go, and swallow up the sand.
Then if I am disgusted in your life
it’s not because of you, but as you are:
Imagine being sick but more like you;
to find a little self care really hard.
Don’t be fearful love it’s not your fault:
The terminal regime you called your life.
I made a creepy home for you in salt
and didn’t see you getting on the plane.
Destinies my fierce heart has rendered
called “draconian”. I made them work for us,
how in fucking hell I am remembered
like being sick on holiday again.
Still with all the safeguards set in place
you will not eat what others put to waste.
Watching you eating the brain as it popped
and I have been up with my stomach in hearts
a twitching nest of caterpillar nails
nothing happened tenderly again, so
nowhere as acute or I would sick
like nothing sick I made a creepy life,
oh you like none like perfect you my dog.
In sick I made draconian my seas;
on holiday again to swallow down
they gaze up lifeless but they must because
the gentle scream “hostility”, I said.
Brain open as it popped and let the smell;
like nothing sick will happen when you die
you chuck yourself and fade out from the air.
(28.03.2019)
Monday, 25 March 2019
Hopelessness IX
IX
For going to sleep by your side is too dangerous to live for, when both the eyes are closed and all the tube is left exposed; the nozzle that has made my pain is flapping like a gorgeous mouth to taunt my mystic shadow in the meadow, gleaming empty. No for I will not again beholden pure to loss getting out
and going back and getting out again, the clot that walks me back along the slowness of the tube as if you shudder back to life beneath the wirey soil pressed back in and go back to begin again as if it never happened making up the movement from the underground refinery, cause to cause to edge of loss and death you lick back up again, once proud inside the meadow going to die there by yourself. My practice, officer, could best be described as moving slowly, then very quickly, then very slowly backwards down the tube away from my body.
“Don’t trust me. Never fully trust me.”
“How will I know?”
“If you go to my house and go to the bedroom and if you find there a small grey solid thing, it is a wedge of limescale, slightly coloured with brick red, and it has an imprint in the shape of an “o” and either a “v” or an “n”. It is 3.7 inches furthest end to end. If you were to, for example, find something like that, there on the windowsill, then you’d know that you couldn’t trust me.”
“You keep it by the window?”
“If indeed I have it, and by the bedroom window… yes.”
“Why?”
“Suppose I found it in their kettle, took it, and kept it. Set it down on the windowsill one day, for want of anywhere else.”
“Can I trust you on this?”
“You’ll have to check for yourself.”
“Then I can trust you.”
“If it is there.”
“Then I can.”
“Then you can trust me.”
Oh quiet and horrible life, tighten your belt etc. A thudding of the air, a wiry fuckup. We would wince at our thoughts. Were told we were collateral, nothing new to report but in new voice, and as attuned we were remained the same. Keep still but don’t. Move but stay.
“Naturally!”
“Naturally…”
Naturally, a natural union between a man and a woman in the sweet meadow. They go face to face. “So tired.”
“You’ll pick up”
“What shall we eat?”
“Zovirax.”
“Again?”
“Again and again.”
“How will I trust you?”
“See for yourself”
“I do.”
“I know.”.
For going to sleep by your side is too dangerous to live for, when both the eyes are closed and all the tube is left exposed; the nozzle that has made my pain is flapping like a gorgeous mouth to taunt my mystic shadow in the meadow, gleaming empty. No for I will not again beholden pure to loss getting out
and going back and getting out again, the clot that walks me back along the slowness of the tube as if you shudder back to life beneath the wirey soil pressed back in and go back to begin again as if it never happened making up the movement from the underground refinery, cause to cause to edge of loss and death you lick back up again, once proud inside the meadow going to die there by yourself. My practice, officer, could best be described as moving slowly, then very quickly, then very slowly backwards down the tube away from my body.
“Don’t trust me. Never fully trust me.”
“How will I know?”
“If you go to my house and go to the bedroom and if you find there a small grey solid thing, it is a wedge of limescale, slightly coloured with brick red, and it has an imprint in the shape of an “o” and either a “v” or an “n”. It is 3.7 inches furthest end to end. If you were to, for example, find something like that, there on the windowsill, then you’d know that you couldn’t trust me.”
“You keep it by the window?”
“If indeed I have it, and by the bedroom window… yes.”
“Why?”
“Suppose I found it in their kettle, took it, and kept it. Set it down on the windowsill one day, for want of anywhere else.”
“Can I trust you on this?”
“You’ll have to check for yourself.”
“Then I can trust you.”
“If it is there.”
“Then I can.”
“Then you can trust me.”
Oh quiet and horrible life, tighten your belt etc. A thudding of the air, a wiry fuckup. We would wince at our thoughts. Were told we were collateral, nothing new to report but in new voice, and as attuned we were remained the same. Keep still but don’t. Move but stay.
“Naturally!”
“Naturally…”
Naturally, a natural union between a man and a woman in the sweet meadow. They go face to face. “So tired.”
“You’ll pick up”
“What shall we eat?”
“Zovirax.”
“Again?”
“Again and again.”
“How will I trust you?”
“See for yourself”
“I do.”
“I know.”.
Monday, 4 March 2019
Hopelessness
And forgotten as the pressing logics that astrict the voice in the situation; the ones that are wrong to do: What is the function of the bank to a human customer struggling? A level of underlying panic is deliberately played into the life of somebody not in a position to make “good decisions”, asked again and again when making “bad decisions” if they think they are making good or bad decisions; this is consent. The low panic is the incentive not to be in it, and until the trap door closes up you can hover just above iy, ducking under, being the most profitable you, only working to pay the bank in daily charges, loan repayments and charges for going over which happens several times a month; it is maintained in text alerts which come just at the right time of the morning, which you are afraid to stop for want of losing more, but which builds in you an energy of panic not indistinct from the energy needed to move through the day, not at all indistinct, so whatever must be done to absolve them and you is almost impossible to do, so that when you make the call your voice clogs up like a choking budgie, just enough to stutter out the meanings of the transfers, they look you up and down, your expenditure, every little thing under the eyes of somebody at work. Someone who is managing to be not where you are. You’ve known these people, three of them. One was a Christian who routinely sneered at the friends you kept and your drinking (so you thought) and the other two are two of the kindest people in the world. Kind people operating slow death switches, which in turn jettison themselves, and the kindness you have felt, not ever wanting to ask again, going back and back slowly then quickly; yards down the tube, away from your body which swings in the havoc lighting of the office as somebody at work leafs kindly through your expenditure and makes decisions according to the maintenance of slow, chronic and often terminal panic at the other end of the line, at the very bottom, meanwhile António Horta Osório makes £4000 an hour which Stephanie Bon, who works for the bank at a low level on £7 an hour raises alarms about on social media and is summarily sacked, and somewhere along this chain of false returns a terrible zeitgeist future flashes bleak red: A blog somewhere, a tiny one, with a tiny readership. It flags up the story of the sacking you are panicked to death in your chair ignoring it still the terrible havoc light flashes gentle as songbirds. The link is made to a Jesuit background, then friends in Israel. The panic is expertly levitated to a broken surface. You glare back at it, the stupid fonts and wallpaper. The glue in your throat on the phone. The tube spinning madly in the distance, unable to be attached now the experts have left the building, fumbling glue fingers after it. You tear on your high vis and screech into the street. Death until the empty meadow seethes in chronic calm. Let me die in pieces.
Sunday, 17 February 2019
Hopelessness
Hopelessness
I.
Somewhere you have never been. A meadow near to it, and the balmy stench. Summer pollen like snow, polder of the afterglow, and you are flooded with joy in the pasture, connected to, and the motion of the swaying grass feeling your heart in your chest taking in the beauty as it scans back the meadow, connected to but not always, you going there and walking in the lapping breeze. Joyous light of late afternoon; not surprised by it swift birds swoop as if dropped and catch back onto the warm rise the ground sends up to the air connected and swirl into the brilliance, fully defiant and as with the air the crickets somewhere you have never been are staring in a way that you have never stared with all five of their eyes in fixed points connected to the optic globes of brain gazing in love at the femur with its coarse hairs each a dapple of complex hooks you have never felt as this in the meadow is a mantis, not the ideal, but may as well be as it perched by the kiss of a flower you long and lift up, connected as you were then to a primal longing for peace shattered.
It is a scarlet day in a place you’ve never been with your eyes closed with another layer of brick and then another then some boards and plaster then the hauntings of a place filled up with the echoes of people who are coming, who is this, standing outside of it making up the pastoral imagining shaking your head sadly, you refuse to use the word “it”, you shake your head and nod your head. You go to work and nod you go home and shake, you sometimes shake in silence or sometimes cry out past the field and into the mechanic room where there is a pipe touched by a woman and it is always the woman who goes to care for you. Madly nodding your head. And the pipe unblocks and comes into you. You and many others, actually the same pipe, always the same room with the woman you shake when you go home, where it is different, a different layer. The woman at work you think of and don’t think of because she moves around in your eyes and the eyes of the whole unit according to where she needs to be at work and at home she is always moving just beyond the point at seeing, which is annoying. Blast that away and out in the meadow in the deep dream state you pollen the horizon, I am, we, you, the whole of the world walking alone in your thirties through the meadow gently congratulating yourself a distant figure slightly annoying, but okay, not at all the worst, and when this beauty flies into the eyes you are younger again and again shedding away all that pollen from the windscreen where the spores fly off to the meadows and arable fields, so tired that you’d like to die, which I mustn’t do, you once told me, held you head into the field’s near the copse the babble of water distronic toxaemia. To before, now and after, straining in the light of the wall, light of the late day, magnificent birds fling up sick when the tube of another kind of engine, one to take things out of my stomach is unblocked and attached this happy trail of a burning myth extinct and then fixed to a word: The meadow scratch you out of the window a long lawn miles down to a fountain whose noise stretched through the silent air you imagine it floats up to you. The possibilities have pared down, which is nice, and in the meadow, for a quiet life, the tube flaps gently in the West wind (at last) and the woman, who must have been the woman in the room who was irritating your view of an empty distance is gone, so surely unblocking this tube can’t be so hard you mutter into the still and balmy air as you begin to fiddle with the nozzle, the breeze being light enough that the tube rocks only very slightly from side to side, yet still it’s not as simple as it might have been. Still though, nice day for it, 101 things a boy can do. Mr. Sergeant? Are you awake? There’s a visitor to see you. The tube swings around to look up. Just birds. Flocks of patients and a sticky smell. It is pollen. I’ll do it! And true to form the nozzle swings up to the energy the hand put there but this time the blockage moves about thirty feet back down the tube and not into you which is where you imagine that it ought to be, that’s how it works surely, or else how would it? The primrose shines out.
That, you explained, is Papilio machaon, whilst that, you see it? It’s similar, but that is Iphiclides podalirius, do you see? A few paces on. Ah! On the search for the elusive Nymphalis antiopa. Never seen at all, the Mourning Cloak, you call back. There is nobody behind you. Then a tap on the shoulder, that I am fearful of. Wie gehts? I am mixing a strange colour for you, filled with glue and wool. Still undulating your grim mouth near the tube the nurse yawns and falls out of character, looks at a photograph of you labouring at the nozzle whilst blood falls luridly out of you and allows herself to laugh, once, very quietly. A British nurse laughs with you, not at you, you say using the nozzle as a puppet mouth, snarling at everything; stage one emphysema. But you go into the museum and look around a bit. Grim for the elated stylus. A tap on the shoulder, this time narrowly. And you turn around to see the figure drift off into the noise. Is it a secret? When do you think you will head here?
Things that could have been yours; a tangible derelict stance on poppies, unbreakable oath, on the feelings of officers, the distant tattoo, and why this corrupt image: The meadow? Too much to easily promise, surely,
and as the district softly agrees to itself the Meadow becomes a station in prayer,
an oath to the silos, abandoned slag, the unlistening feeling, protecting the hobbies of the meadow. You can’t just start working and expect everybody else
to follow, to turn to them and snarl at having started not having
you for guidance. You can’t just expect love you have to earn it, snarling back at the indolent precarious day by night workers pretending not to be tired or in grief but for the £3.70 you are promised and in fact you can’t be in love not at the moment, anything you amount to must have a strategy, like getting out of being forever beholden to loss.
II.
As you become awake your arm goes over your body to check your nozzle. The button on the side of it lights the display. A message says “As this is near your limit, please ensure you have enough money available to cover payments”, which is why you fear the nozzle. The current minimum wage rate for an apprentice is £3.70 per hour. We had been in a fair and stable phase. When you were younger you worked in an extrusion plant. Things have changed. Things that are normal now, being underpaid, not being paid, being paid according to the perceived quality of your work, qualitative payments; for example, to be awarded with your £3.70 an hour you need to work as though you’re being paid £8.21 an hour, and when you start acting like £8.21 an hour I’ll start treating you like £8.21 an hour, that is except for the £8.21 an hour, which may come later. You dreamed of becoming a musician, and spent a great deal of time working away from work, and people would tell you what it was. Now drenched in the teaming meadow. You’re moved into the home. You said you’d always want your dignity, which was dependent on the non dignity of the people in the home. Every morning a music and movement session, based on Tom Kitwood, about endorphins. Never me, you say. Have you done enough to be paid.
Every fucking morning they come in and hold onto people’s hands. You can’t read. Something is making you not able to do it. You can only watch.
One day I will get up and dance, the nozzle glares but the tube itself glares. You yourself glare into the hands you hold singing a song from the forties that you were never in with a care worker who has the same thing in common, never having been in the forties, still the two of you awkwardly singing a lost song whose theme is against loss both beholden to only loss, excruciatingly long, and within it a quiet dignity called loss, real loss, the kind that abstract loss can’t know. Hopeless loss without conditions. Radical hopeless loss without the condition to move, no clause, just there; forever at the mouth of the nozzle glaring out at the Mourning Cloak in the meadow who sits maddeningly still, nozzles filling up their dark wings with your blood.
I.
Somewhere you have never been. A meadow near to it, and the balmy stench. Summer pollen like snow, polder of the afterglow, and you are flooded with joy in the pasture, connected to, and the motion of the swaying grass feeling your heart in your chest taking in the beauty as it scans back the meadow, connected to but not always, you going there and walking in the lapping breeze. Joyous light of late afternoon; not surprised by it swift birds swoop as if dropped and catch back onto the warm rise the ground sends up to the air connected and swirl into the brilliance, fully defiant and as with the air the crickets somewhere you have never been are staring in a way that you have never stared with all five of their eyes in fixed points connected to the optic globes of brain gazing in love at the femur with its coarse hairs each a dapple of complex hooks you have never felt as this in the meadow is a mantis, not the ideal, but may as well be as it perched by the kiss of a flower you long and lift up, connected as you were then to a primal longing for peace shattered.
It is a scarlet day in a place you’ve never been with your eyes closed with another layer of brick and then another then some boards and plaster then the hauntings of a place filled up with the echoes of people who are coming, who is this, standing outside of it making up the pastoral imagining shaking your head sadly, you refuse to use the word “it”, you shake your head and nod your head. You go to work and nod you go home and shake, you sometimes shake in silence or sometimes cry out past the field and into the mechanic room where there is a pipe touched by a woman and it is always the woman who goes to care for you. Madly nodding your head. And the pipe unblocks and comes into you. You and many others, actually the same pipe, always the same room with the woman you shake when you go home, where it is different, a different layer. The woman at work you think of and don’t think of because she moves around in your eyes and the eyes of the whole unit according to where she needs to be at work and at home she is always moving just beyond the point at seeing, which is annoying. Blast that away and out in the meadow in the deep dream state you pollen the horizon, I am, we, you, the whole of the world walking alone in your thirties through the meadow gently congratulating yourself a distant figure slightly annoying, but okay, not at all the worst, and when this beauty flies into the eyes you are younger again and again shedding away all that pollen from the windscreen where the spores fly off to the meadows and arable fields, so tired that you’d like to die, which I mustn’t do, you once told me, held you head into the field’s near the copse the babble of water distronic toxaemia. To before, now and after, straining in the light of the wall, light of the late day, magnificent birds fling up sick when the tube of another kind of engine, one to take things out of my stomach is unblocked and attached this happy trail of a burning myth extinct and then fixed to a word: The meadow scratch you out of the window a long lawn miles down to a fountain whose noise stretched through the silent air you imagine it floats up to you. The possibilities have pared down, which is nice, and in the meadow, for a quiet life, the tube flaps gently in the West wind (at last) and the woman, who must have been the woman in the room who was irritating your view of an empty distance is gone, so surely unblocking this tube can’t be so hard you mutter into the still and balmy air as you begin to fiddle with the nozzle, the breeze being light enough that the tube rocks only very slightly from side to side, yet still it’s not as simple as it might have been. Still though, nice day for it, 101 things a boy can do. Mr. Sergeant? Are you awake? There’s a visitor to see you. The tube swings around to look up. Just birds. Flocks of patients and a sticky smell. It is pollen. I’ll do it! And true to form the nozzle swings up to the energy the hand put there but this time the blockage moves about thirty feet back down the tube and not into you which is where you imagine that it ought to be, that’s how it works surely, or else how would it? The primrose shines out.
That, you explained, is Papilio machaon, whilst that, you see it? It’s similar, but that is Iphiclides podalirius, do you see? A few paces on. Ah! On the search for the elusive Nymphalis antiopa. Never seen at all, the Mourning Cloak, you call back. There is nobody behind you. Then a tap on the shoulder, that I am fearful of. Wie gehts? I am mixing a strange colour for you, filled with glue and wool. Still undulating your grim mouth near the tube the nurse yawns and falls out of character, looks at a photograph of you labouring at the nozzle whilst blood falls luridly out of you and allows herself to laugh, once, very quietly. A British nurse laughs with you, not at you, you say using the nozzle as a puppet mouth, snarling at everything; stage one emphysema. But you go into the museum and look around a bit. Grim for the elated stylus. A tap on the shoulder, this time narrowly. And you turn around to see the figure drift off into the noise. Is it a secret? When do you think you will head here?
Things that could have been yours; a tangible derelict stance on poppies, unbreakable oath, on the feelings of officers, the distant tattoo, and why this corrupt image: The meadow? Too much to easily promise, surely,
and as the district softly agrees to itself the Meadow becomes a station in prayer,
an oath to the silos, abandoned slag, the unlistening feeling, protecting the hobbies of the meadow. You can’t just start working and expect everybody else
to follow, to turn to them and snarl at having started not having
you for guidance. You can’t just expect love you have to earn it, snarling back at the indolent precarious day by night workers pretending not to be tired or in grief but for the £3.70 you are promised and in fact you can’t be in love not at the moment, anything you amount to must have a strategy, like getting out of being forever beholden to loss.
II.
As you become awake your arm goes over your body to check your nozzle. The button on the side of it lights the display. A message says “As this is near your limit, please ensure you have enough money available to cover payments”, which is why you fear the nozzle. The current minimum wage rate for an apprentice is £3.70 per hour. We had been in a fair and stable phase. When you were younger you worked in an extrusion plant. Things have changed. Things that are normal now, being underpaid, not being paid, being paid according to the perceived quality of your work, qualitative payments; for example, to be awarded with your £3.70 an hour you need to work as though you’re being paid £8.21 an hour, and when you start acting like £8.21 an hour I’ll start treating you like £8.21 an hour, that is except for the £8.21 an hour, which may come later. You dreamed of becoming a musician, and spent a great deal of time working away from work, and people would tell you what it was. Now drenched in the teaming meadow. You’re moved into the home. You said you’d always want your dignity, which was dependent on the non dignity of the people in the home. Every morning a music and movement session, based on Tom Kitwood, about endorphins. Never me, you say. Have you done enough to be paid.
Every fucking morning they come in and hold onto people’s hands. You can’t read. Something is making you not able to do it. You can only watch.
One day I will get up and dance, the nozzle glares but the tube itself glares. You yourself glare into the hands you hold singing a song from the forties that you were never in with a care worker who has the same thing in common, never having been in the forties, still the two of you awkwardly singing a lost song whose theme is against loss both beholden to only loss, excruciatingly long, and within it a quiet dignity called loss, real loss, the kind that abstract loss can’t know. Hopeless loss without conditions. Radical hopeless loss without the condition to move, no clause, just there; forever at the mouth of the nozzle glaring out at the Mourning Cloak in the meadow who sits maddeningly still, nozzles filling up their dark wings with your blood.
Wednesday, 2 January 2019
Monologue - from Sappho.
Monologue
from Sappho
I am lying in a dead body under the dead water. You are the distance. As I lie here in my body in the warm dead sea, you are the distance, the light at the top of the water, the arriving and the leaving. I stare across the field towards the buildings. So many lives inside that place they move in the light and hide in the darkness, the field inside the dream, where I climbed into the ground through layers of wires and posts, down into the soil to find your still living body, having been there, down in the earth all this time, and we began to climb up through layers of pipes and posts, to move into the light of the field.
You are still dead, still there in some churchyard asleep in the soil and I wonder who thinks of your name, goodbye until paradise, until we meet again. I touch the surface of the water. We have sat quietly and suffered the violence. Lost our interior lives. My eyes are against the water. My body is beneath you, being slowly deadened by guilt and its attrition. The water has covered my body and I am lying dead in the water. What a frenzy in my breast raged and by what cure to be assuaged, what gentle youth I would allure whom in my haunted heart secure, who does this fractured life subdue, tell me water, tell me who. You may live between the sand and the salt and the breath.
We woke inside the dead water. We were scared... like any newly born baby opening our eyes to a gigantic glow — we lived in the dead water, our dead bodies glowed, we were frightened... every knock, every word. We realised our panic was minute compared to the panic of the mirrors, and it flashed: We were invincible... because we were everybody. We held our bodies together in the dead of the sea. It is a life of attrition I live to refuse, under the cover of the dead water in my dead body I hold you to myself, you are still older than I am. You died so long ago. I believe that you are still moving through the world and through time, through this slow dead water, so beautiful and calm, the surface that I touch with my palm. I stopped being living for you.
And this will be your food, the salt of the water. And this will be your air, my blood and my skin. And this will be your light, the pulse of my chest. And this will be your sleep, the sleep of my body. Look up, so much beauty, look into the ground. Squint with me, into the middle distance, so far back and I am dragging you out of the ground. The escape is corroded. Your overnight balance. We go out of our minds and tear the skin from fish with our teeth. I am lying beside you forever and speaking this. You are moving close again, handing me an open paper bag. I long for your heart to move. It is still. The ground is somewhere, gone. Wind tears the scaffold sheets. But I can barely speak. I lift your body out of the water and begin to walk, holding you in my arms, barely speakable. Please fall out of the dead ground. So far away, and into the hungry earth. I stretched and lifted you into the dried up sky.
The birds are silent (while you remain), in the woods a complete silence of birds. The beauty of the skies I hold you there, Come then, I pray, grant me surcease from sorrow. We are no mercenaries, shaking children unjust in the soil, we are destroyed at inception, dead in the soil, dead in the water, the water is dead, dead in the sockets, dead in the chest. We are dead in the water and the soil. Salt will be our food. Kill the soil and the water, I want you to live again. These are my last words for you, the salt and the water, the birth and the death. Come away from dying, come and stare at me again. Grant the sound to cease from sorrow, quickly the light will follow. I watch the lives are destroyed. Give you limbs and teeth, life after life, up from the soil, up to the air, limbs and a chest and eyes to stare and the peeling deadened water and the mouth of the ground.
Of barely seen, hardly noticed, you were in grey and red, some yellow and the sun in your glass. Would I breathe at you, strobing yellow, grey flecks of red would my dreams haunt me you climbing figure dangling from the sand and salt stained in the sun on the white paper day I stare down into the bag there’s nothing in it the colours are flotsam we’d array love arrests my heart it has destroyed the mind is over is all that is left O, slipping contrast love robbed my heart.
I love to fall asleep, but I fall asleep to you. I am robbed of sleep and robbed from the heart. We lurch up together in the dirty water like wooden deckchairs. I think your chest is moving, or peeling away from the earth. There will be eleven more summers, you said. And my hand moved slowly across the soil. I am near to screaming for you, because you bob in the soil like a collapsed deckchair, close the sky and a little like the light that is coming to touch the sky, and I do not expect your chest to move, nor for your eyes to gently fall open, nor for the ground to give you back, nor for my breath, for paradise singled down to a tiny fleck of yellow in a sea of gray, or a few red bands. But I can hear your voice.
A bit of your voice, a tiny glint of how you would speak with a little creak fleck of yellow, red and tongue glint from the glass, but exactly where we were at this moment or trace of you in a carpark as I sat there alone like the soil. Sometimes buried to me or sometimes that one time so alive and climbing back into the world, older and able to move through the ground. And what you do to the heaving chest though never my eyes or the chest dusted in soil and never decomposed, just a piece of your light seeping into the gorgeous creaking ground.
How the loud sky tugs the tiny chests from the ground. I clench all of my teeth. Deep into the scaffold sheet howls the cladding wind, paper and gold, grey or gray, two strips of red, eleven new summers, I am the birth and the death and the light that is coming, the hopeless stunted light that is come to go again, lain against the water’s top. Red on red I am dead to hope I know not what to do: I have two minds. In doubt I am, I have two minds, one is grey, the other a hopeless splash of yellow or gold I know not what to do. With my two arms I lift your tired body from the speechless ground, so, like a child after its mother, I flutter like a scaffold sheet in the tearing wind. The eyes of my head scan tenderly left to right, the eyes in the sockets of my body in the water stare up at the soil through the salt at your chest. To me thou didst seem a small and ungraceful sea.
Now that we are allowed on the grass will you not speak. I will not speak. Your voice with a tiny creak. You drank in the water forever, every single piece of the water inside you, but you shall ever lie dead; it feels as though everyone has forgotten, that I alone burn for you to live, that tiny blotch of colour by the gate of the car park. Now we are allowed to go onto the grass you wonder unnoticed even through death folding into the shadows and fixed to the gloom where memory seeps away like the water you drink forever.
I clench my wet fists, shot up in colour. The killing of a wave in the colours of the field, the rain is done the sun is come. Circuits and the stars about the grey moon throw down their red beauty. I know one day that you will come, that your madness will step aboard the world, do not try to save me, stay in my arms. Do not save me again.
Down in the leaves press to my cheek the grassy eyes of the hollow bare ground. The motions of soil from the motions of the ground from the motions of water from the motions of your chest from the motions of the water from the motions of the ground to the motions of soil; I stand chest deep in your grave, my eyes gently scream in the rain. Why were the ground why were the chest why were the indicants of the field. Now we go are allowed to the grass and the grass for our feet is the life in the arc, we are falling and moaning, smiling and sharing, a prelude to taking you into the earth. I am stood in your grave neck deep, trying to dry out the last of my eyes. They will not come dry. They are like the dead water that won’t stop pouring into your mouth. Then never ending drinking of the dead water and the never stopping fleck of yellow or gold the grey and the grain of the floor, that pillar, the yellow tree in the corner, the birth and the death, slowly the death, lilting in the warm cool water, holding in a trance to our chests.
Sweet villains in the soil chewing the salt, I am so glad we’re allowed together to go out onto the grass, best to a tender front may I liken you to the quiet water’s top there was no other, no other sound but your quiet chest please come back to the grass, stir not the pebbles, I am standing in a grave up to my ankles and the rain has stopped, we are quite alone, with blushes and gently darting eyes; our kind voices reach up to the incredible colour, in the air, in the water, gathering chests and holding in the longing swell as soil to grey against red to the last fleck of yellow or gold creaking into the coming light.
from Sappho
I am lying in a dead body under the dead water. You are the distance. As I lie here in my body in the warm dead sea, you are the distance, the light at the top of the water, the arriving and the leaving. I stare across the field towards the buildings. So many lives inside that place they move in the light and hide in the darkness, the field inside the dream, where I climbed into the ground through layers of wires and posts, down into the soil to find your still living body, having been there, down in the earth all this time, and we began to climb up through layers of pipes and posts, to move into the light of the field.
You are still dead, still there in some churchyard asleep in the soil and I wonder who thinks of your name, goodbye until paradise, until we meet again. I touch the surface of the water. We have sat quietly and suffered the violence. Lost our interior lives. My eyes are against the water. My body is beneath you, being slowly deadened by guilt and its attrition. The water has covered my body and I am lying dead in the water. What a frenzy in my breast raged and by what cure to be assuaged, what gentle youth I would allure whom in my haunted heart secure, who does this fractured life subdue, tell me water, tell me who. You may live between the sand and the salt and the breath.
We woke inside the dead water. We were scared... like any newly born baby opening our eyes to a gigantic glow — we lived in the dead water, our dead bodies glowed, we were frightened... every knock, every word. We realised our panic was minute compared to the panic of the mirrors, and it flashed: We were invincible... because we were everybody. We held our bodies together in the dead of the sea. It is a life of attrition I live to refuse, under the cover of the dead water in my dead body I hold you to myself, you are still older than I am. You died so long ago. I believe that you are still moving through the world and through time, through this slow dead water, so beautiful and calm, the surface that I touch with my palm. I stopped being living for you.
And this will be your food, the salt of the water. And this will be your air, my blood and my skin. And this will be your light, the pulse of my chest. And this will be your sleep, the sleep of my body. Look up, so much beauty, look into the ground. Squint with me, into the middle distance, so far back and I am dragging you out of the ground. The escape is corroded. Your overnight balance. We go out of our minds and tear the skin from fish with our teeth. I am lying beside you forever and speaking this. You are moving close again, handing me an open paper bag. I long for your heart to move. It is still. The ground is somewhere, gone. Wind tears the scaffold sheets. But I can barely speak. I lift your body out of the water and begin to walk, holding you in my arms, barely speakable. Please fall out of the dead ground. So far away, and into the hungry earth. I stretched and lifted you into the dried up sky.
The birds are silent (while you remain), in the woods a complete silence of birds. The beauty of the skies I hold you there, Come then, I pray, grant me surcease from sorrow. We are no mercenaries, shaking children unjust in the soil, we are destroyed at inception, dead in the soil, dead in the water, the water is dead, dead in the sockets, dead in the chest. We are dead in the water and the soil. Salt will be our food. Kill the soil and the water, I want you to live again. These are my last words for you, the salt and the water, the birth and the death. Come away from dying, come and stare at me again. Grant the sound to cease from sorrow, quickly the light will follow. I watch the lives are destroyed. Give you limbs and teeth, life after life, up from the soil, up to the air, limbs and a chest and eyes to stare and the peeling deadened water and the mouth of the ground.
Of barely seen, hardly noticed, you were in grey and red, some yellow and the sun in your glass. Would I breathe at you, strobing yellow, grey flecks of red would my dreams haunt me you climbing figure dangling from the sand and salt stained in the sun on the white paper day I stare down into the bag there’s nothing in it the colours are flotsam we’d array love arrests my heart it has destroyed the mind is over is all that is left O, slipping contrast love robbed my heart.
I love to fall asleep, but I fall asleep to you. I am robbed of sleep and robbed from the heart. We lurch up together in the dirty water like wooden deckchairs. I think your chest is moving, or peeling away from the earth. There will be eleven more summers, you said. And my hand moved slowly across the soil. I am near to screaming for you, because you bob in the soil like a collapsed deckchair, close the sky and a little like the light that is coming to touch the sky, and I do not expect your chest to move, nor for your eyes to gently fall open, nor for the ground to give you back, nor for my breath, for paradise singled down to a tiny fleck of yellow in a sea of gray, or a few red bands. But I can hear your voice.
A bit of your voice, a tiny glint of how you would speak with a little creak fleck of yellow, red and tongue glint from the glass, but exactly where we were at this moment or trace of you in a carpark as I sat there alone like the soil. Sometimes buried to me or sometimes that one time so alive and climbing back into the world, older and able to move through the ground. And what you do to the heaving chest though never my eyes or the chest dusted in soil and never decomposed, just a piece of your light seeping into the gorgeous creaking ground.
How the loud sky tugs the tiny chests from the ground. I clench all of my teeth. Deep into the scaffold sheet howls the cladding wind, paper and gold, grey or gray, two strips of red, eleven new summers, I am the birth and the death and the light that is coming, the hopeless stunted light that is come to go again, lain against the water’s top. Red on red I am dead to hope I know not what to do: I have two minds. In doubt I am, I have two minds, one is grey, the other a hopeless splash of yellow or gold I know not what to do. With my two arms I lift your tired body from the speechless ground, so, like a child after its mother, I flutter like a scaffold sheet in the tearing wind. The eyes of my head scan tenderly left to right, the eyes in the sockets of my body in the water stare up at the soil through the salt at your chest. To me thou didst seem a small and ungraceful sea.
Now that we are allowed on the grass will you not speak. I will not speak. Your voice with a tiny creak. You drank in the water forever, every single piece of the water inside you, but you shall ever lie dead; it feels as though everyone has forgotten, that I alone burn for you to live, that tiny blotch of colour by the gate of the car park. Now we are allowed to go onto the grass you wonder unnoticed even through death folding into the shadows and fixed to the gloom where memory seeps away like the water you drink forever.
I clench my wet fists, shot up in colour. The killing of a wave in the colours of the field, the rain is done the sun is come. Circuits and the stars about the grey moon throw down their red beauty. I know one day that you will come, that your madness will step aboard the world, do not try to save me, stay in my arms. Do not save me again.
Down in the leaves press to my cheek the grassy eyes of the hollow bare ground. The motions of soil from the motions of the ground from the motions of water from the motions of your chest from the motions of the water from the motions of the ground to the motions of soil; I stand chest deep in your grave, my eyes gently scream in the rain. Why were the ground why were the chest why were the indicants of the field. Now we go are allowed to the grass and the grass for our feet is the life in the arc, we are falling and moaning, smiling and sharing, a prelude to taking you into the earth. I am stood in your grave neck deep, trying to dry out the last of my eyes. They will not come dry. They are like the dead water that won’t stop pouring into your mouth. Then never ending drinking of the dead water and the never stopping fleck of yellow or gold the grey and the grain of the floor, that pillar, the yellow tree in the corner, the birth and the death, slowly the death, lilting in the warm cool water, holding in a trance to our chests.
Sweet villains in the soil chewing the salt, I am so glad we’re allowed together to go out onto the grass, best to a tender front may I liken you to the quiet water’s top there was no other, no other sound but your quiet chest please come back to the grass, stir not the pebbles, I am standing in a grave up to my ankles and the rain has stopped, we are quite alone, with blushes and gently darting eyes; our kind voices reach up to the incredible colour, in the air, in the water, gathering chests and holding in the longing swell as soil to grey against red to the last fleck of yellow or gold creaking into the coming light.
Tuesday, 11 December 2018
Magazine FOR SALE
Hello!
There's a magazine here with hororscopes, gossip, adverts, think pieces, slander, lies and transcripts. It is yours for £2.50. PayPal ashley.french@gmail.com with a note of your address and it is yours.
There's a magazine here with hororscopes, gossip, adverts, think pieces, slander, lies and transcripts. It is yours for £2.50. PayPal ashley.french@gmail.com with a note of your address and it is yours.
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